


Splice of Life

by AllOfThisMatter



Category: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Genre: Drabble Collection, F/M, Fluff, Vignette
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-03
Updated: 2015-04-13
Packaged: 2018-03-16 02:26:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 2,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3470957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AllOfThisMatter/pseuds/AllOfThisMatter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Little moments in the life of Jupiter Jones and Caine Wise.<br/>General fluff, no painful feels.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. fear

**Author's Note:**

> I can't quite remember who suggested it, but they said that "splice of life" was a really good term for any fics involving Jupiter and Caine, and I really liked the feel of it. It's not my phrase, but I'd like to keep using it until I find who suggested it and ask permission.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She's afraid of falling now.

Jupiter wasn't sure exactly why she started being so terrified of falling. She loved being in the sky, free, fearless. But one morning she jerked awake from an awful dream and the fear had rooted itself inside her. Would it pass? She hoped so. She hated being afraid, especially of something so foolish.

Right now, she was staring across the shattering, splintering wreck of an Aegis ship that had been attacked in interstellar space. Caine was holding his arms out, eyes soft even in this moment of hard, jarring action.

"Jump, Jupiter. It's alright."

Her breathing hitched into near-hyperventilation. She swallowed nervously and clamped her eyes shut. With the breaking ship's artificial gravity fading fast, she wasn't even afforded the comfort of her antigrav boots.

"I'll fall," she sobbed, "I'll fall."

"I'l catch you," he answered, "I'll always catch you."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own Jupiter Ascending or any of its characters.


	2. whispers in the night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jupiter awakens in the middle of the night.

Something was waking her up. It wasn't threatening or dangerous, but she was still too asleep to figure out what it was. Her eyes flickered open, adjusting to the cool glow of moonlight that touched the room.

Caine was shifting next to her, his normally even breathing made fast and desperate by some nightmare or memory. His hands clenched and unclenched and his teeth were bared in defense.

She wrapped her arms around him and pulled him close. He went rigid for a few moments, still unconscious, and then relaxed as he woke.

"Jupiter?" His voice was ragged, dry from sleep.

"You were having a nightmare."

"I... I'm sorry I woke you. Please, go back to sleep."

"No, this is okay. You need me."

"Jupiter, you--"

"Hey. What's our rule? When we're falling, we catch each other, right? It's okay. It's alright."

He nodded and closed his eyes, burying his face in her shoulder as his own arms wrapped tight around her until wasn't any space left between them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own Jupiter Ascending or any of its characters.


	3. fairy tales

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Her telescope breaks. So does she.

Jupiter Jones's beautiful antique brass telescope gets broken, under circumstances to be expected in a cramped household filled with high tempers.

She shuts down. Can't cry, can't sleep, can hardly eat. She does her job and comes home and sits on her bed, just staring at her Jupiter poster.

As soon as it happens Caine claims that he's accepted a job and will have to be gone a while. She doesn't really notice, she's so numb, so shattered.

He's gone for two weeks, hunting down her father's original telescope, the one that he died trying to save.

He shows back up at the house in Chicago.

Aleksa opens the door and greets him politely but not too warmly, as she has never trusted any man with her daughter. None of them had ever been good enough; none of them had ever deserved her sweetness, her goodness.

But then she sees it in his hands. Sees the dents from the struggle. Sees the name etched into the metal.

And she stops and really looks at Caine Wise and tears fill her eyes. She is now utterly certain that this man loves her daughter. She brings him inside to her shared room with Jupiter.

She watches the two from the doorway, watches as Jupiter finally cries after two weeks of terrifying silence, watches as she revives.

She watches the honest, contented smile on his face; the soft, sweet look in his eyes as he listens to Jupiter tell him all the things they can see with this telescope. Tells him all about her father.

Aleksa goes back to the living room, her faith in fairy-tale love beginning to grow back, even if just a little bit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own Jupiter Ascending or any of its characters.


	4. given and received

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The splicer's mark.

They were lying in bed after a long, long day, wrapped lazily in each other's arms and exchanging slow, sleepy kisses.

Her lips moved to his collarbone, to his throat, to the brand below his ear. She lavished attention on it, her lips tracing the raised skin like she was reciting poetry. A light shiver moved through his frame at her gentle touch and his arms tightened around her. Her eyes strayed to his face, meeting his soft gaze.

"You never told me what this means," Jupiter said hoarsely.

"You didn't ask."

"I'm asking now."

He closed his eyes. "You know what I am. What I've been created to do. This is the mark of the person who designed me. And it matches a seal that symbolizes ownership of a Lycantent Splice. Actually--"

He paused to open and reach into the side table drawer. Caine turned back to her with a small bag in his hand. He emptied the contents into his hand and showed her the bronze emblem on a sturdy chain.

"It matches this one, specifically."

"Splices don't own themselves?"

He sighed. "Jupiter... Well, no. Not according to the law. Not usually anyway. There are some of us, some special cases, but I'm hardly on that level. I'm really something of a novelty among military stock. Once you're sold to the military, your legion receives your seal. They own you, until you die, until you're transferred, until you're bought for a much higher price. After I was court-martialed, I should have been Unraveled. It is a truly horrific death, but as you know, Stinger took responsibility for my actions and managed to have that particular sentence revoked. I was put in prison, with a regular execution scheduled for some future date, and at this point this seal would have, by procedure, been destroyed. Stinger had a friend at the prison, asked to have my seal. Traded in a favor, claiming sentimentality. Very illegal. Anyway, I was stuck on death row for a few years before Titus Abrasax was looking for a tracker and heard my name. Got me out. To find you. And you can pretty much figure out the rest."

One hand drawing circles on her hip, and the other clenched tightly around the seal, he looked at her again. He was silent for a while, just looking at her with those soft, pensive eyes.

"I've actually been thinking about this quite a lot lately. Jupiter," he said, his voice nothing more than a muted growl at this point. He took her hand from his neck and pressed the seal into her palm.

"Caine... No. I won't take this. I won't own anyone. I won't own you."

He kissed her then, a long and languorous and breath-stealing kiss.

"You already do", he murmured against her lips, and kissed her again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own Jupiter Ascending or any of its characters.


	5. taking a sick day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jupiter's under the weather.

"Ugh, I'm a monster," she croaked, pressing a hand to her blazing forehead and sniffling.

"You're the cutest monster I've ever seen," Caine chuckled, handing her a fresh mug of herbal tea and trading her thick blankets for a thin sheet. "And I've seen my fair share of monsters, Your Majesty."

"Not fair. Totally not fair. I'm a disaster and you're gorgeous as usual. God, this cold."

His mouth quirked up in that annoyingly adorable half-smile as he sat down beside her, dabbing at her face and throat with a cool cloth.

"I don't know. I think you're as beautiful as always. And there's something really sexy about your voice like this."

"What's sexy about sounding like a dying cat?"

Despite them being completely alone, he leaned tantalizingly close to her, lips brushing her ear as he whispered some things that made her blush from head to toe.

"Damn this cold," she groaned as he laughed and smoothed her hair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own Jupiter Ascending or any of its characters.


	6. her eyes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "she's mad but she's magic. there's no lie in her fire."  
> -charles bukowski
> 
> He's loved before. But never like this. And not anyone like her.

It's in the way she touches him, talks to him, looks at him. Like she's running out of time and she wants to give all the rest to him.

It's a silly sentiment, he knows. She has all the time in the universe. She has everything.

Including him.

He knows that he would spend the rest of eternity by her side if she wished it. He knows that he would die by her own hand if she wished it.

If she wished it.

Every morning when he wakes up next to her, he feels like he's just soared around the planet three times too fast, and every night when she falls asleep beside him, he feels like he's drowning but it doesn't matter. He wants to drown in her, he wants nothing more than to be surrounded by her, breathing her in and dying in her embrace.

And she obliges him. Only some god or deity could tell him why she does, but she does, and it feels like worship, like praise, at some shrine of some divine sovereign and he could kneel in awestruck wonder at the altar for hours on end.

She tells him constantly that she loves him. Somedays it is hard for him to believe, when he remembers the names he was called, the lashes on his back, the cold stares of anyone he ever met. He knows she means it but words had never been kind to him in the time before her, and actions were harsher.

But her eyes don't lie. Her warm eyes like the sun-bathed earth on a summer day. 

Before her he hadn't been aware of the raging emptiness inside himself. He hadn't been allowed to want or wish, and so he didn't, couldn't. Didn't dare to hope for something he'd never have, never deserve. And then his arms closed around her for the first time and her voice clouded his head and it was like a knife tearing him open, forcing him to look and see the abyss within him. And it ached and he was terrified of himself, of her.

He's not a man and he's not a wolf. He's something in between, something damaged and broken, but he knows in his soul that the moment he looked into her eyes, the wolf in him had howled _home_ with all the unfelt emotion of years alone, years without a pack. He knows that she destroyed the person he made himself into and that after her, he would never be the same. He knows that if she hadn't wanted him, he would have wasted away. He knows that she rebuilt him, made something good and beautiful out of nothing.

He knows that he loves her, and he knows that she loves him, even when he just can't believe her.

Her eyes will always remind him. Her eyes that saw him when no one else cared to look. 

Her eyes are all he can see now, all he ever wants to see for the rest of his days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own Jupiter Ascending or any of its characters.


	7. his eyes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "sometimes home isn't 4 walls; it's 2 eyes and a heartbeat."  
> -unknown
> 
> She's loved before. But never like this. And not anyone like him.

It’s in the way he touches her, talks to her, looks at her. Like he’s a dying man and she’s a promised afterlife.

She knows it’s a silly comparison, but she can’t find a better way to describe the weight of his gaze on her, the pressure of his feelings pulling at her and holding her to the earth.

He calls her _majesty_ , but she’s not a queen, not in the way that queens are supposed to be, and she never feels like she fits in the title that’s printed on her arm. Even years later it feels like a pair of shoes that doesn't fit quite right, a pencil with lead that keeps breaking, a car that desperately needs a brake job.

The only time she feels like a queen is when she sees it in his eyes; the reverence and devotion and love that shows in them every time those two powerful words pour from his lips. It is then and only then that she can bear the weight of the imagined crown on her head.

He’s her best friend, her guard, her lover, and she’s never known what she did to deserve a man such as he, a man that treats her like she hung the moon. Eventually, home becomes a very distant and abstract concept but she feels it when she’s lying in his arms that she doesn’t need anything except him and even if she lost it all but had his love she’d still be the happiest woman in the ‘verse.

When she wakes in the mornings with her head on his chest, its like melting ice cream in the summer sun, and when he falls asleep with his arms curled tightly around her, it’s like floating on your back in a shimmering sea and not caring if you lose sight of the shore.

He doesn’t say how he feels too much, as he’s not a man of many words, but his eyes, his soft, sweet eyes can’t lie and every murmured “your majesty” is worth more than any love poem. He does say it, she knows. When he thinks she can’t hear, when she’s distracted or falling asleep, she hears his quiet repetitions of _i love you, i love you, i love you_ , and her heart aches with the most intense affection.

She’s a cleaning lady and an immigrant, and she’s so used to people sneering at her and speaking painfully slowly in simplistic English that his total adoration is near-unbelieveable and she’s never understood why he loves her but he does and it makes everything sharp and bright all at once.

She can’t say the exact moment that she fell in love with him, but she knows for certain that her fate and his were inextricably linked the moment she awoke beside that gun in the lofty room of Willis Tower. Hands raised in surrender and calm, clear voice instructing her how to use the weapon, these are her first unclouded memories of him and she holds them close to her heart, aware even now of his gentleness, his kindness in those terrifying moments.

Sometimes in her dreams she feels his hands snatching her back from death, hears him say _i’m here to help you_ and she wakes up worried that he was always just a dream before she sees him sleeping peacefully beside her and all her fear dissipates into the night.

She wonders how she would ever have carried on if his interest in her had remained professional, if she had fallen so carelessly and recklessly in love with him only to have him forget her once his job was done. But he’s still here, still with her always.

She knows that she loves him, and she knows that he loves her, even when she just can’t believe him.

But his eyes will always remind her, his eyes that saw her when no one else cared too look.

His eyes are all she can see now, all she ever wants to see for the rest of her days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own Jupiter Ascending or any of its characters.


End file.
